"You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God"
About this Quote
The subtext is less anti-knowledge than pro-certainty. Bakker’s world, built inside televangelism’s bright, camera-ready faith, depended on testimony, trust, and a kind of performative intimacy with the divine. Education threatens that economy because it trains you to ask for receipts: historical context, textual criticism, contradictions, power structures. Those questions don’t just challenge doctrine; they challenge the authority of the people selling it.
Context matters: Bakker’s celebrity was forged in a late-20th-century religious media machine that treated faith as both personal salvation and mass entertainment, then watched it implode under scandal. In that light, the quote reads as a cultural reflex - a defensive posture from a religious public sphere that felt itself losing ground to secular expertise, universities, and the prestige of “being informed.” It’s also quietly poignant. If God is a “relationship,” then leaving isn’t merely changing an opinion; it’s a breakup. Bakker names the grief underneath deconversion: sometimes the hardest part isn’t disbelief, it’s what disbelief makes you lose.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bakker, Tammy Faye. (2026, January 16). You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-can-educate-yourself-right-out-of-a-95048/
Chicago Style
Bakker, Tammy Faye. "You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-can-educate-yourself-right-out-of-a-95048/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-can-educate-yourself-right-out-of-a-95048/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.









